Spanning almost three yards in both height and width, Frank Stella’s monumental Metjaroe emerges from the Bamboo series which the artist began in 2002. Towering hypnotically before the viewer, it presents a biomorphic tangle of industrial materials, coerced into seductive organic rhythms that mutate and modulate from every angle. Inspired by the artist’s experiments with bamboo, its looping configuration of stainless steel tubes is articulated with all the dexterity of a line drawing. The work’s title was inspired by the metjaroe purifying ceremony performed by indigenous Balinese cultures, where food offerings to minor deities are intricately interlaid onto a bamboo construction, as described in Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s 1932 anthropological study Balinese Character: a Photographic Analysis. Stella mined this volume to title each work in this series.

Metjaroe is a natural progression of Stella’s practice, where from the early 1970s, the artist ceased working on flat canvas in favor of the spatial exploratory potential of three-dimensional constructions. The bended steel and aluminum tubing and sheets project out away from the wall, granting a sculptural dimension to this work, which Stella still referred to as a painting, saying when the work was first exhibited at Kasmin Gallery in 2003 that “a sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere” (F. Stella, quoted in D. Solomon, “Frank Stella’s Expressionist Phrase, New York Times Magazine, May 4, 2003).

Following the artist’s contention that this work is a painting, Stella’s conceptional understanding of space is revealed, as Metjaroe functions a multidirectional painting which appears to move in space, existing somewhere between the second and third dimensions, where curving lines and swerving planes emphasis the disjuncture between the wall and the illusionary picture pane. Expanding geometrical abstraction out into real space divulges Stella’s longstanding conceit that all canvases are three-dimensional, existing on the surface: “there’s space in Picasso, in Matisse, and in, say, Miro, but they don’t care much about it, and it’s pretty shallow space. It’s really what they do on the surface… that’s the way it was when I started out. It’s pretty much the surface, and eventually, in order to have more space, I just added more surfaces to work on” (F. Stella, in an interview with Laura Owens, published in Frank Stella: A Retrospective, Whitney Museum of Art, 2015, pg. 157).

While Stella is famous for disavowing any external referents in his work, preferring to see his practice through a formalist prism, Metjaroe, like other works from the Bamboo series, encloses shapes within its twisting metallic coils and folds which read as faintly anthropomorphic and anatomical—most prominently the lip-shaped form in the center of the painting. Responding to one critic who asked the artist if he discerned this “labial imagery” in the series, Frank Stella said, “[e]veryone loves labial references in anyone's work. I'm not going to deny that it's there. I'm not going to deny that I live in the world and that I have had distant relations with women. You know, my father was a gynecologist” (F. Stella, quoted in D. Solomon, op. cit.). Stella’s cheeky response reminds of his famous 1964 declaration regarding his minimalist Black Paintings: “What you see is what you see.” Almost forty years later, Metjaroe perfectly exemplifies Stella’s dual insistence on the spatiality of surfaces and the viewer’s agency in interpretation.